Chapter 2 American Crow #5
Ivy regarded me with an expression I’d only ever seen on the face of a bear at the zoo: curious, dangerous, impassive.
People believed that Ivy was all style and no substance when, in fact, she was all substance, including her style.
Her own look was so minimalist it made those old black-and-white photographs of Audrey Hepburn look flashy.
She didn’t wear any makeup at all except a flick of mascara and this sort of tinted balm that made her face look lit from within. I had never seen her eat.
“What I mean by larks is morning people. They call them extreme larks. They get up early, early, like five in the morning.
People who live their best lives when it’s still dark. Meditate. Write. Pray. Garden. Go running.” I pictured a woman jogging
through Grant Park in the predawn. Accessories she’d need: An aluminum truncheon, lightweight yet lethal. A can of Mace.
Ivy turned back to the photos.
“What do you think of it?” she said. “It’s your story.”
“You mean my story about Felicity! I think it’s a powerhouse story and I won’t write it in a gee-whiz way. I’ll ask feminist
scholars for their opinions . . .”
Ivy curled her lip. To her, feminist scholars were big butch dames in bad boots. She had no use for them.
“Okay, I won’t ask feminist scholars their opinions,” I continued, although I intended to do it anyway. “I’ll talk to professors
who study the role of women in culture, and there’s a medical doctor at Harvard who’s writing a book about women and revenge.”
“I didn’t mean that story. I mean this story,” Ivy told me.
“It’s pretty,” I admitted. “But it’s weird. Can you imagine yourself really wearing a velvet top hat with a veil? Where would
you wear it? And what would you wear it with?”
“Not the point, Reenie.”
“Well, it’s very pretty.”
“Some sort of satin-and-lace slip dress and a long cape. One with a train that drags on the ground.”
I said nothing. I hated gowns and coats that dragged on the ground.
I could think of nothing except that they epitomized the culture of profligacy.
Mulberry silk, a hundred dollars a yard, diaphanous as a butterfly’s wing, dragged over pavement, stepped on, spilled on, torn.
When I went to the Met Gala last year, and I was indeed required to go to the Met Gala, where I felt like a trout in a tank of black lace angelfish, I wore a black-and-gold Chanel minidress that the magazine had rented for me at a cost that was more than the rent on my apartment.
I was so sick with anxiety over the dress that I couldn’t eat or drink anything except ice water and moved like a toddler with a full diaper.
In my interviews, I confused Jennifer Hudson and Jennifer Lawrence, even though one was a Black singer and one a white actor.
(“At least they were both women,” Ivy said with a sigh.
“It would have been worse if it was Martin Lawrence.”) I was ill-suited to my job.
I was ill-suited in all kinds of ways. It would never have occurred to me, in real life, to try to “palette” (a verb) my handbag
to my shoes (not “match” it, being too “matchy-matchy” was almost as dangerous as being color-blind). Ever the tutored self,
I now had a private skeptic within; I hated having to find something to admire in a Louis Vuitton or Gucci. They were desperately
ugly: The clunky chains and clips were to accessories what a garbage truck was to a Porsche Carrera. Why did anyone pay for
such garish stuff? Did people really admire them or was it an emperor’s-new-clothes thing and nobody wanted to be the first
to come out and say it?
Ivy was still studying the images. “It might be pretty, but it should be breathtaking. These pictures suck. I’m going to have
the whole thing shot again. Horses, maybe. What do you think?”
I tried a joke. “We’d have to get really big hats for them.”
Ivy left the duskily lit photo studio and I followed.
She made the kind of noise with her tongue that people make to call a dog, and Marcus Rhinehart materialized as if he’d been crouching under a desk, but a desk with a three-way mirror, wearing a pale blue Loro Piana twill blazer over black jeans from The Row.
“This is not working,” she told him. “Padraig is so full of himself. Maybe we should call someone else. No, no, he’ll do it again and get it right.
Find some horses. Same women, not just models.
Healthy women who look outdoorsy. I want this done today. ”
Marcus appeared about to throw up. Where would he find horses on a Saturday afternoon? How would he locate Padraig and face
the towering tantrum that would ensue when the photographer was forced to do a reshoot on short notice? As if she could read
his thoughts, Ivy told him, “I’ll handle Padraig. You get the elements. Wisconsin and Michigan and those places are . . .
the fucking Midwest. There have got to be plenty of horses.”
“We have to get them here and I have to book the indoor warehouse space again . . .”
“No, an outdoor space, like a ranch or a farm.”
“Okay,” Marcus said. He angled his eyes at me. I was from Wisconsin. Marcus was from Brooklyn. Surely, I had relatives who
got up early to milk the cows? I smiled and shrugged.
“Well, Marcus, if it has to be tomorrow, I mean first thing, daylight, that will have to work, Marcus,” Ivy said. She had
used his full given name twice. Marcus was on her official shit list, although he’d had nothing to do with the feature story,
which was called “Taking the Veil.”
Ivy turned to me. “Now about that story. Reenie, as you know, Fuchsia is aspirational. This idea of yours feels . . .” She shuddered. “It feels very sordid. This woman is a sex worker. We’re
about fashion as communication. Issues that face women. This is crime pure and simple, and it could also be seen as voyeuristic.”
With intention, I let my eyes rest pointedly on the scantily clad model with the big hat covering her lady parts.
Ivy snorted. “Okay, Reenie. Point taken.”
“It’s anything but simple, Ivy. The story is in how she got this way, Ivy. When we knew each other, she was admired. She was
respected. Even by the teachers and . . . community leaders.”
“Maybe she was sexually abused.”
“Her father was a minister.”
“Well,” Ivy said, with some satisfaction. “There you go.”
“Even if it were that straightforward, and I’m betting that it’s not, last I heard, domestic and sexual abuse and objectification
were indeed issues that face women. Those are issues women face throughout their lives, from girls to elders.”
Marcus said, “It sounds utterly depressing, Reenie.”
I turned on him. “Don’t you have to see a man about a horse?”
“I just don’t know if our reader is curious about what drives the life of a high-priced escort . . .”
“Oh wait,” I said, holding up one hand and peering down at my phone. “I have to get rid of this. Give me a second.” I took
a few steps away and, in a whisper, voice-texted Marcus: If you don’t stand by me on this, you are dead to me. I will never fix you up with another spectacular woman . . . Marcus was as straight as the fabled strip of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable Lake Shore Drive where our office building stood,
but he was also beautiful and worked for a women’s fashion magazine. Surrounded every day by epically gorgeous female creatures,
he sometimes protested his heterosexuality too much, and some of those women ended up thinking Marcus really wanted to go
shopping with them instead of going to bed with them.
Now, glancing at his phone, he said quickly, “On the other hand, anybody would be fascinated by this. Man or woman. Young
or older. Clearly, something profound happened.”
I put in, “This isn’t a lifestyle piece, Ivy. This isn’t a story about courtesan couture. It’s a story about a brilliant,
beautiful woman, a good person, who left home and started doing this a long time ago, when she wasn’t even old enough to drink.
Right now, she’s barely twenty-seven and she might spend the rest of her life in prison. I’m not saying that I’m sorry for
her. But I’m curious. Aren’t you?”
Ivy adjusted the lacy bib of her six-hundred-dollar coveralls.
Denim would be the next big thing. We never knew whether Ivy created fashion trends or intuited them from cultural clues, like sounds only dogs could hear.
But she was invariably right: ten seconds after our story last year about the return of plaid, (“Tartan Is on Trend!”), everyone was wearing kilts.
Ivy said, “I don’t think so, Reenie.”
“Well,” I said and took a deep breath and let it out slowly, “then I’d like to request a leave of absence. To cover this.
A few months. Someone will buy it.” Ivy slowly shook her head, side to side.
There was a long pause. If Ivy had said just one more word, I’d have taken it all back. In the ordinary run of things, wherever
I worked, I would still have had a good year ahead of me of answering phones and bringing people research files before I wrote
anything except “Snowball Boosters, left to right, include Hale Shipson III and Ginger Rayburn Shipson . . .” I recalled how my hair smelled after a long night of tending bar and sometimes waiting tables at Angel on the Rock, especially
on Thursdays, when the nightly special was fried oysters and onion rings with sauerkraut, and how the head under my hair hurt
from the smell of the strong coffee and the sound of impassioned poetry. Just as not everyone who is beautiful is good, not
everyone who is earnest is a poet.